Strange Loops in the Binary – neither high road nor low

1.

1st September 2015.

I’m standing on an island in the Adriatic sea holding a book about the War Crimes Tribunals in the Hague and the people who were living seemingly normal lives who became agents in programmes of genocide.  Moving towards the saline lake I fall and with right arm broken, book floating off into the lake and no telephone, I am thrown back on the help of strangers who take me to hospital, look after me till I am treated then fix me a taxi to Split from where next day I fly home.

12th September 2015.

On this day I am due to talk at the Highlands Institute of Contemporary Art in Scotland about an exhibition they’re showing linking to Croatia, but I’m in a London hospital recovering from an operation to realign the damaged bones.

A few days before my accident I had been on the island of Korčula, where the grey) (area [Croatian: siva) (zona)] gallery sits on a low road by the sea, where children at dusk plunge into the eddying waters between boats and jetties. I’d been invited to speak at the opening of New Materialisms Station 2 an exhibition curated by Darko Fritz who run a gallery dedicated to contemporary and media art in Croatia, open throughout summer months and only in the hours of darkness. Their latest show featured Joseph Beuys, Max Bense, Alexei Blinov and Vladislav Knežević.

In the window a perfectly designed, minimalist poster distracted attention from glaringly bright day trips to snorkel for gleaming fish style signs elsewhere in the bay. Grey) (area occupies temporarily available spaces around Korčula’s walled old town built by stone-masons who helped build Venice. It’s a contemporary art space inflected by the medieval and localness, a breathing space for those who drift in and away, at the close of summer.

Geoff Lucas and Eilidh Crumlish, co-founders of the Highland Institute of Contemporary Art (H.IC.A) an artist-run space at Loch Ruthven, near Dores, in the Scottish Highlands, have been in ‘close curatorial dialogue’ with the founders of grey) (area for several years. This has evolved into shared programmes relating to overlooked histories of concrete art, concrete poetry and the conceptual from the 1960s to the present.

On my journey to the island from Split, I’d been thinking about the idea of the post-geographic a phrase I read in a copy of The New Statesman given away at Gatwick. The issue is the last before the deadline for Labour Party leadership elections. Jeremy Corbyn is the sole story. He was at that point ahead in the polls though simultaneously behind in terms of Labour pundit appreciation. In this late August issue, the youthful Laurie Penny declares for him.  She argues that it is her generation – digitally literate and post-geographic – that get him.

2.

Reflected in the black light of the waters when I arrive by boat at Korčula I recognised the face of Alexei Blinov with Darko. I had last seen Alexei in London several years ago. He is indelibly linked in my mind with the group of formative artists autonomously operating in the halcyon days of the ‘90s, back before the Backspace netlounge and medialab in Clink Street, London, became a Starbucks.

The work Alexei has brought from its development in Russia to the island of Korčula is a holographic installation called Open Source Vostok. To make it, Alexei has created holographic images of a slab of ice brought to the surface of a lake in the Antarctic by Russian engineers doing deep drilling in search of ancient life forms. Their investigations reached the surface of waters which had not seen sunlight for 13 million years. Press reports earlier this year had hailed major scientific breakthroughs. Alexei has managed to gain access to the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St.Petersburg, where the ice is preserved and through holography has managed to find a different means of communication. The holographic images sit at the back of the gallery emanating a strange orange red light, like eerie referrants or icons of a diminished polar future.

In the front gallery is a video of a German live television programme made in 1970 with guests Max Bense, Joseph Beuys and Max Bill.  It’s a heated confrontation. A transcript available for gallery visitors conveys little of the intensity which is evident from the body language. While Beuys’s forehead sweats under heat of studio cameras and his speech is emotional and intense, Bense remains cool and his voice cerebral. He is requesting that Beuys account for how and at what level his artworks have changed anyone’s consciousness, as Beuys has been claiming.

Another work in this space also references Bense and his influence. This is Binary Pitch an audio-visual film made by Zagreb artist Vladislav Knežević which will also be shown at H.I.C.A. It draws on Bense’s book “Aesthetics and Programming” written in 1968 and his goal of ‘programmes for the production of aesthetic conditions’ which he developed using early computers. Knežević works cleverly with shifting ambiguities, with distance and repetition, with nearness and absence, animating a theatrical auditorium, lifting and lowering the empty seats. It creates dissonance in the mind of the viewer between unanticipated openness and unexpected closure.

3.

Whilst watching this I think about something computer art pioneer Frieder Nake told me about his time in the late 1950s studying mathematics in Stuttgart Technical University.  We were looking at a wall-board I’d worked on for Paul and Daniel Brown’s Art That Makes Itself exhibition in London  which referred to Max Bense and his books Aesthetica which we had cited as key in influencing the development of computer art in the early 1960s. He said how he remembered that the word programme had been intensely important to the researchers around Bense attending his lectures on language, philosophy, semiotics and poetry. The Study Gallery in Stuttgart which Bense helped to establish became the first exhibition space for computer graphics in the world. Known as a philosopher of science, Bense’s own doctorate had been in quantum mechanics and the relativity of existence and he is now recognized as the founder of information aesthetics. The General Studies course which he co-founded and his journal Augenblick were critical avenues for inspiring and catalyzing emergent interdisciplinary approaches.

Also attending Bense’s lectures was Hansjörg Mayer, a young poet-typographer, friend of Bense’s son Georg, and son of a master printer who went to make concrete poetry portfolios and futura pamphlets in the early-mid 1960s which included works by Bense as well as Frieder Nake.  His own autonomous typography works stand as exceptional examples of language (in the form of alphabets) decomposing almost to semiotic code.

Mayer has spoken of how Bense, his former teacher and collaborator, was enthusiastic about all except one aspect of his work. Despite deploying random generators in his own writing, Bense described Hansjörg’s prints made using aleatory processes (creating accidental ‘events’ on paper through expert experimentation with the printing machines) as, in his view, “zu chaotisch”.

4.

Whilst in Korčula I discussed with Darko the work called ‘256 poems for SPASMO' which the late Alan Sutcliffe, co-founder of the Computer Arts Society, contributed to the ‘Tendencies 4’ exhibition in Zagreb in 1969. This was a work which Alan wrote about in 2013 as ‘a chaotic piece’ made using an ICL 1904 computer and which involved a different graphic poem for each member of the audience to recite prompted by changing slides, film and computer based sounds. For the ‘Tendencies 4‘ show Alan sent 256 poems with an English vocabulary and 256 in Serbo-Croat to Zagreb.

I had showed the graphic score of this in ‘Poetry, Language, Code’ an exhibition about formal correspondences between concrete poetry and early computer programmes which I curated in Cambridge in 2012 inspired by the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth. Shortly before he died Alan wrote a text called MAIN GROUNDS (anag. 5,6) about his works shown in this exhibition. He embedded an anagram in the title which up to now remained unsolved.  But in writing this essay I have finally decoded it. The answer is USING RANDOM.  

5.

Sitting within the context of the Scottish Highlands, H.I.C.A. is ideally located to directly or subliminally investigate the interplay between constructed and organic form. For their Programmable States? exhibition, running simultaneously with the show in Korčula, the curators selected Knežević’s Binary Pitch as well as works by Paul Brown and William Latham, two artists working with generative software, whose work nonetheless sits firmly in the lineage of 20th c modernism.  

Both Brown and Latham have documented their debt to Scottish biologist, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and his On Growth & Form book written early last century. Deploying contemporary and evolving software, they more closely seem to mirror organic and natural systems than  perhaps would have been possible at the height of modernism when new technologies were young. To show this work against a backdrop of the Highlands, where landscape dictates the patterns of existence, with wildness not fully owned or managed, opens up important dialogues and new insights into the limitations of holding determinate distinctions between for e.g. concepts of the natural and the artificial. An early work by Latham called The Artist as Gardener addresses precisely this intersection.

Latham’s later artwork, with its fractals, mutations and recursive looping, connects closely with the unsettling question-mark in the H.I.C.A show’s title. The artist’s hand is now increasingly called into question as artificially intelligent, generative systems can be designed that seem to autonomously evolve in indeterminate ways (resembling the game of life). Latham has spoken of how his work has been described as “like Escher on acid”. Perhaps audiences are unsettled by familiar yet unfamiliar patterns of cellular decomposition. Perhaps these point towards shifting hinterlands of chaos below smoothly programmable surfaces.  

As winter comes in, the numbers of people needing refuge around the north, south, east and west edges and peripheries of Europe is also now increasing. Writing this text now, three months after my personal cry for help in Croatia, I’m reading news stories about the arrival of families from Syria to be rehoused on the Island of Bute, where the town of Rothesay happens to be twinned with Korčula. In strange loops and random journeys, the distant concept of the post-geographic is becoming everyday nearer.